our model

In order to build a growing community of leaders, Teach For India has developed a two-part theory of change.

In the short-term, through our Fellowship program, we provide an opportunity to India’s brightest and most promising individuals, from the nation’s best universities and workplaces, to serve as full-time teachers to children from low-income communities in some of the nation’s most under-resourced schools. Through this experience of teaching in classrooms and working with key education stakeholders like students, principals, and parents, our Fellows get exposed to the grassroots realities of India’s education system and begin to cultivate the knowledge, skills, and mindsets necessary to attain positions of leadership in the education system and identify their role in building a larger movement for equity in education.

In the long-term, we engage these leaders, our Alumni, and support this growing community to advocate for change. Our Alumni work in diverse roles within the education sector, as teachers, teacher-trainers, school principals, curriculum designers, and education policy researchers, as well as in the ecosystem surrounding and supporting the education sector, as journalists, lawyers, health experts, entrepreneurs, and corporate leaders, all with a shared purpose to build a broad people’s movement for educational equity that will accelerate progress towards that day when all children in India have the opportunity to attain an excellent education so that we, as a nation, can find our light and our true potential.

Teach For India Fellows commit two years, full-time, to providing their students with the opportunities that can put them on a different life path. The Fellowship journey is one of teaching and learning, of working for children while developing your leadership. Our Fellows are on a mission to end educational inequity for their children, and through this, they develop a long-term commitment to multiplying that impact as Alumni.

Each Fellow is assigned a classroom in one of Teach For India’s placement cities, and charged to teach academics, values and mindsets and to give their students the access and exposure they need to reach their personal, long-term visions. Our framework for leadership at Teach For India is called the Leadership Development Journey, and is centered around three commitments:

- The Commitment to Personal Transformation: Exploring who you are, your purpose, and striving to be a better person.

- The Commitment to Collective Action: Building relationships and organizing partners to multiply and deepen our impact.

Fellows work on these commitments in and beyond the full-time lab of their classroom, where they relentlessly focus on moving their students towards “path-changing” learning, the highest level of our Student Vision Scale.

By growing in the 3 commitments, and embedded with real life leadership experiences in the classrooms and communities, Fellows are ready to be lifelong learners and leaders for greater impact on children.

1. RECRUITMENT & SELECTION

The power of a movement depends on the people who fuel it. Teach For India recruits our country’s most promising college graduates and working professionals for our Fellowship Program. Our Fellows come from a diverse array of backgrounds including the nation’s leading corporates (e.g. Accenture, Aditya Birla Group, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, TCS) and a wide range of universities - both local and abroad (such as Columbia University, Indian School of Business, St. Xavier's College, St. Stephen’s College, Oxford University and more)

Fellows complete a rigorous, multi-stage selection process where they are evaluated for core competencies that, according to our internal data, are essential for success within and beyond the Fellowship. Competencies include demonstrated leadership, critical thinking, grit, and commitment to our mission.

2. TRAINING & SUPPORT

The Fellowship is a challenging and incredibly transformational experience for both our students and Fellows.

Teach For India provides Fellows with extensive training and support throughout the course of the Fellowship. Designed to equip Fellows with the knowledge, skills and mindsets to become successful teachers and leaders, our support is both pre-service and in-service:

Institute: Prior to their school placements, Fellows undergo a rigorous five-week residential training program that focuses on classroom practice and leadership development. At Institute, Fellows are not only introduced to the pedagogical foundations of classroom instruction (e.g. lesson planning, vision setting, classroom culture) and content instruction, but they also begin to internalize the mindsets and beliefs needed to drive transformational change within education. Additionally, they get an opportunity to practice their teaching at Summer School during Institute training.

Ongoing Support:Throughout the two years, Fellows receive ongoing support through a combination of in-person training sessions, leadership forums, as well as online training courses and resources. In addition, each Fellow has a full-time Program Manager who provides on the ground, intensive technical, leadership and emotional support.

3. SCHOOL PLACEMENTS

Teach For India places Fellows for a period of two years in full-time teaching positions in low-income schools. We strive to place Fellows within high-need schools - where poverty and other environmental factors may limit our students’ choices in the future. Within their classrooms, Fellows are responsible for ensuring that their students reach ambitious academic and personal goals that are deeply grounded in their context and developed in partnership with key people in our children’s lives - parents, other teachers, and community members.

In 2015, Teach For India’s 1100 Fellows work in over 320 schools across Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore.

4. PEDAGOGY & IMPACT ASSESSMENTS

At Teach For India, we believe that India’s students need and deserve a holistic educational experience - one that equips them with the knowledge, skills and mindsets to succeed. The need for a holistic education only grows more pressing for India’s most disadvantaged students, who must navigate a range of issues arising out of poverty to achieve their dreams.

We have a threefold Student Vision: Academic Achievement, Values and Mindsets and Exposure and Access and believe that it is when we integrate the three that the magic of a great education comes to life.

Impact Assessment: To ensure that our Fellows and students are making progress towards our vision of an excellent education, we employ a number of metrics and assessment tools to measure our efforts.

Reading Comprehension and Mathematics: All of Teach For India’s students take bi-annual standardized assessments, developed in partnership with an external assessment company, to measure progress on reading comprehension and mathematics.

Personal Growth: Using standardized rubrics and sampled surveys, we measure personal, non-academic growth that includes values, mindsets, and exposure and access.

Ongoing Studies: In addition to internal assessments, we are currently implementing a longitudinal study, designed in partnership with Columbia University, to measure the academic and non-academic effects of our program over time.

Where possible, Teach For India students stay with a Teach For India Fellow until they complete their schooling.

1104 Fellows in 2015-16

At Teach For India, we envision fostering a networked community of Alumni who are committed to their role as leaders and movement-builders for the cause of educational equity in India.

Our hope is to see our Alumni play a key dual role - not just as leaders in their respective fields and workplaces (be it early-childhood education, vocational education and teacher-training or research in a school, non-profit, university or corporate) but also as builders of a movement for educational equity in our country. Our hope is to see them mobilize resources and organize people towards the cause, to see them inspire men and women at all levels of the education ecosystem and enable their leadership development, to see them inform policy debates and influence conversations on educational equity and to see them innovate and amplify the impact they are having on children through their work and spread it beyond the walls of their own organizations and communities.

2011 Alumnus Anoop Parikh decided to return to his low-cost private school in Govandi to continue teaching post the Fellowship, because he believed that the process of immersing himself in the community and working with key stakeholders would help him understand the problems first-hand, enabling him to design solutions for his children.

2009 Alumnus Ashish Shrivastava works as a teacher in a remote tribal area in Chhattisgarh, a region hit hard by the Naxalite insurgency, where he is trying to develop a contextualized curriculum that works for children in that region.

2013 Pune Fellow Jai Mishra worked with his School Management Committee to mobilize the entire parent community to advocate for free secondary English medium education for their kids, playing the role of an initiator and a catalyst.

2013 Delhi Fellow Anurag Kundu helped his kids conduct the ASER survey to measure the learning levels of children across 400 families in their community, Seelampur. The students presented the state of education in their community to the Head of ASER, Rukmini Banerji and other government officials.

Our Alumni continue living by the 3 commitments of personal transformation, collective action and educational equity as they graduate from the Fellowship and our hope is that they will continue leading our people’s movement for an educated, shining India.

PLACEMENTS

Teach For India supports graduating Fellows in career opportunities post the Fellowship through the Career Portal and Internal Career Fair. Organizations from across sectors recruit Fellows through the Portal, with opportunities that build on their leadership learning.

Through the Fellowship experience, Fellows are also exposed to networking opportunities, access to the larger network, mentoring with industry stalwarts, and engagement with other Alumni through the Alumni Portal.

With a strong belief and focus on the power of the collective, Teach For India has set up the Innovations Lab along with the Central Square Foundation and Villgro, to support Fellow and Alumni entrepreneurs to develop sustainable and innovative solutions to the most pressing problems in education in India.